|
He started out by drawing in one note at a time
with the mouse, but "after it would take me days to finish
something, I thought, 'This is crazy.' Although I don't have keyboard
chops, I know my way around a keyboard, and I decided that's probably
how I should enter the music. That way, every note wouldn't be entered
at the same velocity, which was bumming me out. When you enter a
note with the mouse, it goes in at velocity 64. When you enter notes
from the MIDI keyboard, Encore picks up the dynamics. Now, obviously
there's the issue of it being too perfect, because it goes in precisely
on the beat and the computer's just going to read the music as written.
I'm using a really old version of Encore, and there's no 'randomize'
or 'humanize' function, so I've just found ways around it and tried
to make things breathe. I try to obtain a live quality to what I'm
doing, as though the musicians were sitting down and reading the
chart, and interpreting it.
"When I start, it's with just an idea in my
head, maybe just a groove, not necessarily anything solid. I might
say, 'This kind of feel interests me. Let me explore this.' I'm
transcribing what I'm hearing. Since I'm dealing with Encore, if
I think something cooler could happen on beat four of bar six, then
I just delete beat four and throw in a fill. I might even start
out with the basic pattern, like everybody does in a drum machine-type
situation, but then take that basic pattern and go back measure
by measure and make it a little different.
"It's still tedious. But if you think about
the time it would take -- especially with the kind of music I'm
trying to write -- to make the phone calls to musicians, see if
their schedules would work out to rehearse the stuff, and then maybe
get a couple of takes....With the computer, I actually sit down
with nothing written and eight hours later have a completely finished
product."
The process. The drum parts Scott writes
are outstanding -- there's a lot of interesting variation, but the
groove never disappears. And unlike a lot of computerized drummers,
he avoids the temptation to play 25 different drums on each beat.
It's a virtuoso performance, but a realistic one. He finds that
entering the drum hits as musical notation helps out, because he
can easily see the notes in relation to each other.
To start, he assigns the main drum kit to the bottom
staff, then selects a step size in Encore. "If I want a 16th-note
groove, I select a 16th-note step and play it on the keyboard,"
he explains, "and create the part linearly. I wanted to get
away from the multitracking approach, because when you're playing
a fill you can't be playing a hi-hat groove. I've heard that so
much it just makes me crazy.
|
|
"So I have one staff for the main drum kit,
and then I have another staff for the 'ghost notes.' The [Roland]
JV-30 allows me to have two drum kits at the same time, so I use
one drum kit for the main kit, and then I use the orchestral kit
for the ghost notes of the snare. I back up all the main hits of
the snare on the main kit.
"I'll think, 'The main hits on this measure
were two and four, so they'll hit hard like the main part, but there
are going to be all these ghost notes with the hi-hat. So I have
to think against the hi-hat and omit hi-hat hits where the snare
ghost notes will go. When a drummer plays ghost notes between his
hi-hat with his right hand and the ghost notes with his left hand,
they're trading off.
"I try to write the solos as fast as possible.
As soon as I hear the lick in my head, I say, 'Okay, what are the
rhythms?' and play it on the keyboard as fast as I can. I think
of the dynamics that might occur if it were being played live --
trail off, build up, whatever. I try to be really aware of every
note I'm playing as I'm doing it, the way it's related to the next
note, the last note....I try to not go back and tweak solos unless
it completely doesn't work. That way it's still improvised in a
way -- in slow motion, but still improvised."
Scott recently became the music director for Grace
Church in St. Louis, which involves arranging in contemporary styles
for full rhythm section and vocals, and often horns and strings
as well. We wondered if he ever gave his computer-notated pieces
to human players to get their opinions.
"No," he said. "This is my superhuman
Macintosh music. I'm going to leave it at that. Not that it could
never be developed for a live band, but when I'm sitting writing,
I'm thinking, 'What if I owned Chick Corea's Elektric Band and they
were all sitting here and I could just hand them parts? How would
they play it?' And although there is that caliber of musician in
this town, I don't really have the money, and I'm sure they don't
have the time. So, I just sit down and think, 'Nobody's ever gonna
play this, but I don't want to make it sound totally ridiculous
and unplayable either.' I write completely differently when I arrange
for live musicians. I try to tame it somewhat so that it's playable
fairly quickly and they can leave room for themselves.
"What's funny is that since I've been arranging,
I haven't sequenced a thing. I haven't had the time. I wake up ,
I transcribe, I go teach guitar. It's a great situation. Maybe that's
what all the sequencing was leading up to. It was teaching me how
to arrange, because I never went to school.
"I've been playing in the band up at Grace
for five years, with these incredible musicians, so I have all that
stuff in my head. The computer's been a great thing for me to get
all that stuff out. At one point, I used guitar, drum machine, and
four-track, but now that I have this, I couldn't even imagine it.
Overall the computer has been just a great thing for me. Even if
I can't put my guitar with it or it has certain drawbacks, it's
still probably the best thing that's happened to me in a long time."
|
|
We suggested that the next step might be hard disk
recording, which would allow him to capture his guitar and combine
it with the MIDI parts. Scott replied, "Oh yeah! It all comes
down to finances. I do make a really good living playing music,
and it's just been great, but I don't have a lot of extra money
lying around to invest in a lot of the tech stuff. I've got what
I need, and that's the barebones stuff. I have access to some great
musicians up at Grace, and that pretty much is my live outlet, because
we play all kinds of styles up there. So it hasn't been frustrating
to just be sitting in my basement sequencing and have that be my
only outlet.
"I basically just wanted to pass this stuff
around," Scott concludes. "I hope eventually to be known
as a composer and sequencing artist. I'd love to score for film,
write or sequence for major artists, and eventually release a CD
of my work. I've gotten some really great feedback from the Internet
-- through AOL I've met [producer] Jay Graydon, [guitarist] David
Torn, [bass player] David Hungate from Toto, a lot of those guys.
I sent out my tapes to them and they've been incredibly supportive.
This is the stuff that I've got in my head that I get out through
the Mac and really can't get out anywhere else."
|
